Talking Mobicents with Ivelin Ivanov

The following is the contents of an [email] Q&A with Ivelin Ivanov, the founder and lead of the Mobicents open source project. Mobicents is a highly scalable event-driven application server that adds video, data, and voice convergence to the Java EE platform, read the FAQ for more information--

Sometime in 2002 I noticed how mobile devices become powerful enough to run custom applications that any developer can build. With background in J2EE, I started thinking about the middleware that would be needed to support future intelligent mobile devices. That is how Mobicents was founded.

Q: Under which open source license is Mobicents distributed?

It is available under dual-licensing policy similar to that of MySQL and Asterisk. The default open source license is GPL (GNU General Public License). Commercial licensing is also available upon request.

Q: Mobicents is JSLEE 1.0 certified, what is the JSLEE standard and what is the significance of being compliant with it?

JSLEE is the landmark standard for high performance Event DrivenArchitecture (EDA). It is a crucial component of VoIP Middleware, where high volume, low latency signaling is required. Scalability and high availability are a must at levels exceeding thousands of incoming transactions per second, each completing within tens of milliseconds. Being compliant with JSLEE ensures safe investment for application developers, who can choose from a number of vendors. It also allows for economies of scale because users and vendors work together to extend the platform with more standard features that benefit everyone.

Q: What is the Mobicents Foundation?

It is an effort to accelerate the advancement of Mobicents by allowing strategic partners to donate funds and development resources to the project in exchange for access to the core team and the ability to influence project roadmap.

Q: What are Service Delivery Platforms (SDP) and IP Multimedia Sub-Systems (IMS)?

Some other thoughts on the Mobicents value proposition as a JSLEE:
1. General market demand for converged services deployment platform

2. Growing popularity of JSLEE as a viable industry standard for SLEE. Based on a track record of successful projects at top tier telecoms as well as demonstrated portability of applications between JSLEE implementations from different vendors.

3. Mobicents has been certified for JSLEE almost 12 months ago and it has established a reputation of stable development environment. There are a number of projects that have passed pilot stage and are about to be launched in production trials this summer. The Open Source SLEE has also been engaged in international, multi-vendor projects such as TeleManagement Forum Catalyst ICON2 and EU Programme 6 OPUCE.

4. Fast paced development community. The project is approaching 400KLOC and there have been over 20 man years invested between contributing partners. The project forums are the 3rd most active on Java.net. New modules are being added very aggressively mainly due to simultaneous
contributions. Most recent additional have been a new SIP servlet resource adaptor, XMPP RA, Media/JMF RA and Diameter/AAA RA.

5. Sharing development cost is paying off. Partners are beginning to realize the savings and increased productivity by sponsoring the core team and actively participating in the development of the platform.
Each has been able to build internally a small elite team of JSLEE experts, while freeing up the majority of their resources for custom application development.

6. Documentation, best practices, and examples have been mushrooming at a fast rate due to the open nature of the project. Everyone learns from the mistakes of others and quickly advance together.

Q: What should we look for from Mobicents in the next 6 months to a year?

- Career grade 1.0 GA release is on the horizon

Next:
- Support for JSLEE 1.1
- More high availability features
- A number of improvements of existing resource adaptors and
additional resource adaptors for Media, Federated Identity Management,
Google Talk/Jingle, more SS7 protocols, Billing
- Production time Management and Monitoring tools
- Enhanced Service Creation and other development tools

Q: What notable open source efforts are related to Mobicents?

JBoss, NIST SIP and XMPP4J are among the most popular open source efforts that are related to Mobicents, but the full list is a lot longer.

Q: It seems as if Mobicents has drawn a great deal of interest from mobile operators abroad, what would you attribute this to?

See the values to operators listed above. In short, European and Asian
operators are very aggressive at implementing next generation services and they need the lowest cost, high quality infrastructure to build on. Participating in an open source standards based initiative fits
the bill.

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1 Comments

Hi Ivelin,I have read so much about your exploit in the Java telco convergence. I work for the leading GSM operator in Nigeria. We are very interested in JAIN SLEE. I need your contact to be able communicate our needs better to you.Thank you and hope to hear from you.

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